Andrew Dickens: We're all feeling the pinch, especially the Government

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we’re broke.  The Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update shows we’re still in debt and the debt is getting bigger. So, we’re broke. Not enough money, everything's more expensive so it’s off to the money lender before the bailiffs come in and sell everything. Sounds like a lot of households around me.  Ideally, we’d be in a surplus - that’s when we have more money than costs. But we aren’t and the possibility of that happening has got further away.  Make no mistake, deficit is bad, but surplus is only okay. That’s how bad we are. And we’re getting more and more in debt. The Government has a debt to GDP ratio of 41.8% and it’s forecast to rise to over 46% before it starts going down.  But lets put another lens on this: the New Zealand Government has posted a surplus 17 times since 1980. That's 17 times in 45 years. So the government has been broke 62% of the time since then. Being broke is our normal. And if I applied the surplus/deficit/debt ratio to my own finances then I’ve been broke most of my adult life. I mean, who hasn’t had a debt-to-equity ratio of 95% in their lives? So if you look at it that way it’s not so bad. And we’re still in the right half of the indebted nations list. Everyone’s broke. We’re a bit naïve when we demand surpluses about just how hard it is to do.   Listen to Steven Joyce on Heather’s show yesterday: government books are hard to turn like a super tanker. As he said yesterday, it can take a decade.  But some of us think a few public service cuts and cuts to benefits and we’d be tickety boo.   But our fiscal crisis is far more fundamental than that. What we really need to do is make more money in the world, so we have more tax revenue, so we have more good stuff and less debt.  So, what are you standing there listening to this for? Get to work.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.